Buenos Aires, Argentina

Before leaving the States for South America, there were a lot of things I was excited about doing and seeing this month, but none more so than Buenos Aires. Honestly, we could have planned our month route to go in any direction, and as long as it somehow wound through BsAs I’d be happy. Especially after the past four days or so where we’d been on 20-hour bus after 20-hour bus, we were extremely ready for the city because we’d planned on staying there longer than one or two nights. We arrived at the bus station around 2pm last Friday and after a quick goodbye to Keith (the American guy we’d been traveling with since Salta) MB and I headed off with Jon (the Canadian) to look for a hostel in the city. While doing anything after sitting on a bus for 20 hours may sound like a good idea, walking around a hot city with all our luggage following a map with a few marked hostel places got old quickly, but the last place we looked before heading back to the main street turned out to be a good deal and we stopped at Sudamerica Hostel for the night, and from there our adventures began. Side note: because BsAs was just so dern cool, and because we stayed there six days (by far our longest stint yet) I’m not going to stick to just a top five. And anyways, not like I ever promised I wouldn’t ever add a few every once in a while. So here goes – our seven memories of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Us with Maradona - who was all over Boca

7. La Caminito – After a few days in Buenos Aires, we were pretty used to walking everywhere, so one day we decided to walk from our place in the center to one of the barrios: La Boca. Boca is famous for a few things, including being the birth place of Tango, being a dangerous neighborhood, and being home to the Boca Juniors stadium. It turned out to be a bit of a really long walk though, and once there all there really was to see was the Boca Stadium and the Caminito – basically a street art gallery where local artists sold paintings of tango and the neighborhood. Also this happened to be a day that MB and I weren’t feeling too hot, so we ventured to figure out the (really confusing) bus system and got back to city center on wheels.

6. Recoleta Cemetery ghost stories – On our second night in Buenos, we had decided to take things easy (as our first night was pretty intense… see number two below). We’d stayed in at the hostel and cooked dinner (which in retrospect may have been the reason we didn’t feel well when we went to La Boca… see number seven) and then we were looking around on the internet for things to see in the city the next day when we ran across a page about cultural events in Buenos Aires. And one of those events happened to be going on that night… in a little over an hour. So we got cute and grabbed a cab to the Recoleta cemetery, about a 15 minute ride away (Side note: only one of two cab rides this entire month. We’re so damn cool) to see Alberto Laiseca, a famous Argentinian writer, read ghost stories. We arrived and felt super trendy amongst a crowd of hipster locals and literary types, stayed long enough to listen to the first 20-minute story (entirely in Spanish and somewhat mumbly by the old gentleman writer) and then hopped up and decided to stroll around the neighborhood. Then, sans map and just using our keen senses of direction, we made the 50-minute walk back to the hostel from Recoleta. Again, so cool.

5. Book market – Apparently Buenos Aires is famous for being a very cultural and literary city, and as such there are all kinds of books shops everywhere you look in the city. We’d been wanting to go in and explore some, when on our second to last day in BsAs we were wandering around Palermo (the biggest of the barrios) and found an entire street of used book vendors in little stalls. So we perused the books, again, feeling trendy, and settled on some Argentine poetry and Spanish literature classics.

4. Free walking tour – I’d found a website advertising these free walking tours of BA by a British ex-pat living in the city, and we’d meant to go early in our time there but didn’t end up making it till our second to last day (the same day we found number five). We met up with the tour in the Plaza Italia in Palermo and were joined by two other American couples (yes, MB have gone back to being a couple, since at this point Jon had left our group). I wasn’t too sure what to expect from the tour, as many of the sites we went to I’d already seen in previous days walking around the city, but the information Jonathan (our British ex-pat guide) provided was great. We basically learned about the layout of the city, the history of the city, and a fair amount about the recent history of Argentina in general. We had political stops like the capital building and the Casa Rosada (the president’s offices – the pink house!) as well as cultural ones like learning about the most famous tango singer Carlos Gardel, and finally just some fun ones, like the fact that the Kosher McDonalds in the large shopping mall Abastos is the ONLY kosher McDonalds in the entire world outside of Israel.

Jon hangin out at the Kosher McDonalds - which isn't allowed to be photographed

3. El Bomba del Tiempo – Unlike many of our other stops on this trip (which as you can tell has mostly been to smaller towns and sites) our time in Buenos Aires not only included day-time activities, but also some nightlife finally added into the mix. Back in Salta, a Dutch girl we’d met had told us that if we went to Buenos Aires and were there on a Monday we HAD to go to El Bomba del Tiempo. So, on Monday night after parting ways finally with the Canadian, we headed off to the Konex theater, which ended up being about a 20 block walk, but whatever. Gotta burn those empanadas off somehow. El Bomba turned out to be an amazing experience. The inside of the place was an open courtyard that eventually became packed with a young hipster crowd and a whole lotta weed smoking, and around 8 pm 15 guys walked on to the stage all dressed in red and black jumpsuits and took their places around a circle formed by an assortment of drums. For the next two and a half hours we were blown away by what was basically an amazing drum line jam-sesh with a brief appearance of a talented pan-pipe player. The crowd was a bit slow at first but the pace quickly picked up and soon the jumping and dancing and clapping was non-stop.


2. Pub Crawl – As mentioned in number three, Buenos Aires was our first city where we really got a taste of some night life in South America, and on our very first night in the city Jon suggested we do a Pub Crawl that was advertised in the hostel. So we did. Again, this was one of our first times to have a successful night out (as in actually going out and not just getting dinner and a drink and feeling sleepy)… so we went a little hard. The pub crawl consisted of an hour of free beer, wine and pizza during registration (which, for some reason, we’d decided to pregame with an orange liqueur and Egyptian Rat Screw… although embarrassingly the Canadian won) and then included a walk to three bars in the Puerto Madero barrio (each with a free shooter) and finally free entrance to a club in the same area. Let’s just say after the second shooter the drinking wasn’t necessary, and by the time we got to the club things went by somehow and we ended up getting back to bed a little after 6 am. And that’s all MB is allowing me to say about that.

1. Feria San Telmo – After our night at the pub crawl, we needed a full day to recover, and so after our recovery day we got up somewhat early and headed over to one of the top recommended things to see in Buenos Aires – the open air Sunday market in the San Telmo Barrio. Totally worth getting up early for though, as the streets leading up to the main square were full of local handicrafts and vendors, and the main market turned out to be an incredible vintage fair. Everything there had to be guaranteed to be made before 1970 and the wares included everything from costume jewelry to 1930’s Rolex watches to antique books and glasses and the randomest trinkets and knickknacks. We walked around all the stalls at least three times ohh-ing and ahh-ing and buying all sorts of unnecessary plastic objects before we’d gotten our fill. Unfortunately, we somehow have expensive taste and some of the items we really wanted turned out to be a couple hundred US$, so had to pass those up. On the way home, the morning was made even better by a stop at a local walk-in sandwich shop and two very delicious choripans (chorizo sammies). Good day.